president, when hurricane sandy struck, hundreds -- when hurricane sandy struck the northeast, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people were without power. we all saw the video footage, we saw the terrible trauma and people are still trying to dig out from underneath the debris of hurricane sandy. during that period of time, hundreds of workers drove up from the south wanting to help. these workers were nonunionized and they were turned away. this was a sad day for our country that nonunion workers were not allowed to participate in the cleanup and were asked to join a union before they would be accepted as workers. i think it's a mistake to politicize things like this, particularly at a time of an emergency. so what i've asked for and what my amendment would do would be to allow an exemption to davis-bacon. davis-bacon is a federal law that requires that we not have competitive bidding on federal projects. what happens is, on federal projects the wages are fixed at a union scale wage, and there is not a competitive bidding for wages. so what i've asked is that we suspend that a